Rethinking the Right to Bear Arms

How apocalyptic gun-rights ideology wrecks democracy.

The inhumanity of the slaughter in Newtown, Connecticut should not be met with despair. Though no society can extinguish human evil (and any that tries will likely not end well), democratic politics assumes that collective action can at least mitigate the problem. Seeing as no other developed country has anything like our problem with gun violence, it seems like murder-by-gun isn’t a pre-political, immutable feature of modern life.

But to hear the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its allies tell it, the roughly 32,000 deaths from gun violence per year are unavoidable byproducts of the Second Amendment. “We doubt that [meaningful action to reduce mass killing] is possible, in a way consistent with the principle and the fact of the Second Amendment,” the editors of National Reviewwrote. Nevermind that the majority in the Supreme Court case establishing a right to own handguns, DC v. Heller, found that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on…laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” No intermediate step between an outright ban and our current lax regulation could, according to National Review, make a dent despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary.

That’s because the “Second Amendment” so commonly invoked by gun advocates isn’t the actually-existing Second Amendment to the Constitution. It’s a stand-in term, one that signifies adherence to an ideology – call it, for lack of a better term, the gun rights ideology. I use the term with caution, as the gun rights ideology isn’t about rights in the ways we ordinarily understand the term. Rather, the gun rights ideology is more properly a form of anti-politics, one opposed to a decent political order rather than part-and-parcel of it.

It’s important to first clarify what the gun rights ideology isn’t: sincere and well-justified belief that the United States should protect handgun ownership. While I think Heller was wrongly decided, there’s a reasonable case that the Court got it right. Moreover, it isn’t clear that a handgun ban would actually work. So the gun rights ideology must be separated from the debate over handgun ownership specifically.

What distinguishes ideology from reasonable disagreement is the former’s sweeping totalism. The right to bear arms, on the ideological view, is a right with virtually no limitations. Any restriction on gun owners’ ability to acquire and maintain weapons of their choosing is an intolerable violation of individual liberty. Charles C.W. Cooke, decrying calls for gun control after Newtown, put it well: “In a free republic, the people cannot be disarmed by the government, for they are its employers, and they did not give up their individual rights when they consented to its creation.” Cooke sees this right as ruling out “any attempt at gun control in America,” presumably ranging from gun bans to stricter background checks.

The NRA, of course, is the gun rights ideology’s guarantor, opposing everything from federal research on the epidemiology of gun violence to international treaties on the arms trade that don’t actually regulate domestic gun sales. While the lobby’s power is oft-overstated, there’s no denying that the NRA’s totalist opposition to gun regulation has had a dominant influence on American gun policy, ruling out effective gun regulations that would not restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens to own or carry guns. Federal law allows 40 percent of gun sales to take place without any background checks on the purchaser; 80 percent of gun crimes involve guns purchased in these off-the-books sales. It has also, on the gun lobby’s request, restricted the feds from sharing information with local police attempting to solve gun homicides. Though most NRA members actually support enhancing regulation in these and related areas, the NRA itself opposes them, along with the swath of mostly red-state congresspeople who toe the NRA line. The gun rights ideology, then, is not marginal: it plays a critical role in limiting the options available to federal and state legislators looking to mitigate the loss of 32,000 lives.

But the problems with the gun rights ideology extend beyond this terrible human cost. While its proponents cloak themselves in the language of “rights” and “freedom,” the argument they give for unfettered gun access is antithetical to the foundational assumptions about democratic decision-making.

Consider the argument from tyranny: state control of guns forecloses our last line of defense in the event that America goes Weimar. On first glance, this argument sounds just like the standard argument for freedom of speech and expression. These rights protect the stuff of democracy; they enact our ability to freely shape our own collective destiny. Absent certain protections, the government would be free to curtail individual freedom without protest. The Second Amendment is the First’s backstop.

But that’s wrong. The tyranny argument is different from true political rights in one crucial respect: it doesn’t protect a right to democratic action. Voting, staging a protest, or writing a personal blog on politics are all attempts to influence political life through the democratic process. Protecting these rights absolutely, without exception, is a means of ensuring free and equal access to the levers of collective self-determination. Democratic rights open up the sphere of deliberation, attempting to maximize our ability to make change through democratic, constitutional processes.

Say what you will about armed revolution, but it isn’t that.

This difference matters. Asking a liberal society to take some options off the political table to safeguard the foundations of participatory democracy is one thing; asking that society to allow unrestricted access to deadly weapons so they can suborn the system itself if necessary is quite another. It’s not just that the gun rights ideology, per Alan Jacobs, represents “the absolute abandonment of civil society,” though that’s also true. It’s that it places itself against the democratic process in the name of paranoid fantasy.

The logic of perpetual apocalypse is unremitting. Because no modern liberal democracy as stable as the United States has ever succumbed to totalitarianism (and please, don’t talk to me about Nazi Germany), there are no warning signs to look out for, no knowledge about what infringements on gun rights are the first step towards tyranny. Assuming that gun rights are really the first thing to go if we start down the road to serfdom, then it would seem necessary to protect them absolutely, as you never know which gun restriction might represent the first mile marker. Indeed, that’s why NRA arguments against prudentregulation so frequently lapse into paranoid conspiracy-mongering about plots to undermine the Second Amendment.

This thinking is profoundly undemocratic and, in a certain sense, profoundly unconservative. Democracies are supposed to, except in cases where fundamental democratic and human rights are at stake, be free to consider all available policy options to solve problems at hand. 32,000 gun deaths a year mean that we undeniably face a real problem. Yet by making the specter of totalitarianism the lodestar for the American gun debate, the gun rights ideology precludes the sort of collective deliberation that democratic societies value as a means of solving problems. It also abandons a conservative appreciation for empirical detail and moderate, pragmatic policy experimentation in favor of wild fantasy. If part of what we appreciate about democratic politics is public, rational deliberation, then argument from tyranny is a heresy.

Some critics of gun regulation will undoubtedly object, arguing that this isn’t a fair description of their position. In their view, the burden should be on gun regulators to prove that restrictions on sales work. People have a right to purchase and own whatever they’d like without constraint unless that in some way violates the rights of others. Gun enthusiasts enjoy the same freedom to pursue their passions as, say, avid drinkers or stamp collectors.

This argument, whatever its merits, is divorced from our actual debate about guns. There is no way to get from that principled libertarianism to opposition to background checks on gun sales. Nor do the most prominent exponents of gun rights ideology really accept it – you don’t often hear congressional Republicans supporting cocaine legalization, for example. The modern discourse on gun control makes no sense unless it’s understood that one side is motivated by gun rights ideology, underpinned by the argument from tyranny.

The point here is not to suggest that the NRA and its allies are a threat to American democracy itself. Rather, it’s that they’re a threat to the quality of our democracy. Democratic theorists tend to see open, rational public deliberation as a key element of a successful democratic order: it helps citizens make honest and informed choices about which policies and politicians are worth supporting, about which values they want to shape the system that’s supposed to represent them. The move to cast every gun regulation as a threat to the Second Amendment is opposed to that democratic debate. It’s a stalking horse for the specter of tyranny, a fantastical conversation-ender rather than a point of view worth taking seriously.

So the next time someone invokes the American Revolution as a reason to oppose gun control, it might be worth mentioning that they’re undermining the very values the Founders risked their lives for.

Zack Beauchamp is a reporter/blogger for ThinkProgress.org. Follow him on Twitter.

Paranoia? I don’t think so. I fully expect to see an all-out police state in America. By many criteria, it’s already here, despite the farce of elections to rotate rulers. What could the “armed citizen” do in the face of all this government firepower? Not much, but don’t tell me it isn’t here.

(I guarantee you those drones over our back yards will be armed in five years or less. Given that “officer safety” is the prime directive for those appointed to “serve and protect” us, what better way to neutralize those known to harbor banned weapons? Or banned thoughts.)

Unfortunately Mr.Beauchamp seems to not only be ignorant of history but believes that America is supposed to be a Democracy when in actuality it is a Constitutional Republic. With that said, I think people like Zack Beauchamp parrot the Main Stream Media propaganda of how we can somehow vote into office the “right” people do the “right” thing to correct the “ills” of society in a “civil” manner. After trying that for decades ,not only have we lost most of out fundamental Rights but our nation is now bankrupt. The problem with Mr. Beauchamp is that he lives in la la land. You can’t vote away Rights. We are supposed to live in a nation where the Rights of the individual must be protected from the voting power of the majority. This is one of the fundamental values that the Founders risked their lives for. You cannot substitute individual Rights for mob rule,which is what a democracy does. It seems that if a majority vote away the firearms Rights of a minority then that action,in Mr.Beauchamp’s eyes “legitimizes” the taking or diminishing of Rights. It seems that Mr. Beauchamp is completely blind to not only history but to the fundamental foundations of our Constitution and it’s republican limited government foundations. To quote the Supreme Court: “When it comes to Rights there can be no rule making.” The Right of a citizen to have a firearm is sacrosanct. This doesn’t mean that that citizen has a right to abuse that Right. That with rights comes responsibility. But in the end, Rights cannot be infringed upon. We must be vigilant lest we lose what is left of our liberties.

The NRA’s political advocacy arm is the worst enemy proponents of gun rights in this country ever had. The anti-gun brigade don’t even have to construct a straw man, the NRA have already done it for them.

I grew up in a city that suffered one of the worst crime rates in the country and that had far too many guns. By the time i’d reached my 20’s i’d had too many brushes with people with guns who clearly should never have had them. I have always been a proponent of gun regulation, and i don’t see how regulation transgresses the territory of the 2nd amendment.

I agree that the tyranny defense for gun culture in the U.S. is far too easily resorted to, for a few reasons. For one thing, it’s unrealistic since it doesn’t account for the fact that the private citizen is outgunned by the tyrannical government, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that. And further, we are one of the most authoritarian nations on the planet. Witness the erosions of personal freedoms and constitutional protections over the last 15 years, during which time the vast majority of the country has fallen quickly in line. When The Revolution comes, just how many of the 270 million guns in private hands will be pointed at police and military? The entire notion is absurd.

And yet, the 2nd was placed there for a reason, like the Bill of Rights itself. It isn’t an addendum or an after-thought, it isn’t the 9th or 15th item. It comes right after assembly, speech and religion in a document drafted specifically to limit the power of government.

Ok, so the NRA did all the work for you. But that doesn’t make their straw man any more substantial. You can’t dismiss the 2nd amendment simply because it’s been adopted as an ideology… that also happens to support a specific manufacturing group.

I have lived in a revolutionary country, in which every citizen claimed the right to arms to defend him or herself against tyranny. What you had, instead, was the tyranny of the adolescent gun-toter, the intemperate gun-enthusiast, the hot-headed gun-carrier – and the dead piled up upon the dead.

I live in a democratic country. My government has a monopoly of force, and that monopoly I keep in check through the ballot box. I don’t seek revolution, nor welcome it; and where the police exceed their authority, through the ballot box and my ultimate control of the armed hierarchy of the state, I keep them in check. It is good and proper that I don’t feel the need to either carry a gun to cower from those who do. That’s what civilisation is all about.

Canada and Australia have much lower gun-homicide rates than the US. They have a similar history, culture, and legal tradition. They are as free as we are. They have guns, just not as many and more regulated.

Why do we make this so hard? Historical revisionism about the purpose of the Second Amendment is trumping common sense.

This article briefly caricatures the argument about the second amendment guaranteeing the other portions of the Bill of Rights, then burns the strawman in the next paragraph. The right to participate, assemble, speak, and vote only apply when you can do that or if the government or others allow it and pay heed. Gun rights alone do not facilitate civil society or collective action, but they do dissuade dominance and coercion. Moreover, it’s not just the government who commit acts of coercion, other groups do as well, as the terror campaign against ethnic minorities following the Civil War demonstrates, including the concerted effort to restrict their access to guns to protect themselves.

Also, the US is not a pure, majoritarian democracy. The US constitution was set up to protect dissenting groups from oppression by the majority. Without the means to dominate and suppress these dissenting groups, we must resort to participation and compromise.

Finally, while I wouldn’t characterize Athens or the Roman Republic as a liberal democracy, they do provide other examples of participatory governments that collapsed into tyranny. Nepotism, corruption and lack of accountability enable extractive institutions and predatory practices can take hold quickly and poison civil society unless continuously counteracted. Societies that have concentrated coercive power with their elites have generally succumbed to tyranny, even if some of them limited it to a subgroup who lacked access to protection.

To be clear, I’m not arguing for absolutes here by any means, but the second amendment plays a critical role as a last resort to prevent predatory exploitation and dominance, which facilitates respectful collective action.

Look, I know TAC is very, very concerned with “epistemic closure” in conservatism, but must their answer to that be to publish the most ridiculous, overwrought, fallacious piece of progressive commentary they could find?

“Asking a liberal society to take some options off the political table to safeguard the foundations of participatory democracy is one thing; asking that society to allow unrestricted access to deadly weapons so they can suborn the system itself if necessary is quite another.”

First, you should look up the word “suborn” because you are not using it correctly.

Secondly, the two mechanisms you describe above are different, yes, but they are not mutually exclusive. This country exists because of an armed revolution; whether that makes you uncomfortable or not is irrelevant. The wording of the 2nd amendment clearly and directly links the existence of an armed citizenry to the security of a “free State.”

Finally, as such an ardent fan of democracy (which is not America’s form of government, and which was considered the lowest type of government by the people who coined the term), you should understand that in any nation the “system” of government is not the same as the government itself.

A government is a particular group of people who govern at any given time, not some amorphous blob inextricably tied to incorporeal political theories. Corrupt and/or tyrannical governments can be deposed without changing the system of government one bit. And that is precisely the reasoning behind keeping an armed citizenry for the security of a free State.

Without guns, our founders would have just lost their lives and we would still be under British rule. The American Indians didn’t have guns, or not very many of them and look who is in control now.

But forget all that, our current leaders and political process is the holiest of holies. We can have absolute, blind faith that they and it will never do U.S. any harm. Our leaders and political process would never go against our wishes. If they do, then we can vote them out of office in two, four or six years, but as we know some pols can hold office until they die. So much for the grand political process, or our Democracy since we ceased being a Republic many years ago.

I remember a quote from a movie: “There you stand with your law books. Here I stand with my guns. We’ll see which one wins the argument”.

But not to worry as we live in the most benevolent place upon this earth.

I have seen two comments above stating that the U.S. is not a democracy but a republic.

Could you kindly assist in my education by pointing me to a text or website that outlines the differences as you understand them between a republic and a democracy? I would appreciate it if you do.

I’ve often heard the saying that the U.S. is not a democracy but a republic. I’ve never really understood what that means. For my part, I live in a constitutional monarchy. In practice what this means is the tyranny of the party in power in a majority government or the fractious rule of the plurality party in a minority government. Beyond election day, democracy as such, has nothing to do with it.

How does it work in a republic?

I am not trying to segue away from the actual point of the article here, but if democracy is significant to the discussion, I would argue that a fuller understanding of what “democracy” means, should add and not detract from the discussion.

What a waste of space. Interesting how “progressives” find hidden unwritten rights to abortion and argue tirelessly the democratic process cannot regulate what most Americans in many states consider murder. The right to own firearms is explicit. Regulation has been a feature of that right for over two hundred years. Nothing new, genius. The NRA is a lobbying organization that is entitled to participate in the democratic process. It wins some, it loses some. Too bad the author believes it is a threat to his personal “democracy without mean people” but save it for an ardent high-school newspaper editorial.

I, like many little r republicans find that the use of a gun to commit a violent act is despicable and evil. 32,000 dead is too many but how many more would die if our natural right to protect ourselves with a deterrent force equal to that of the one trying to hurt is taken away. Look at DC where the Heller case was decided. It has areas where police will not enter unless they have backup and in large numbers that area the 8th Ward is 1 1/2 miles from the Capital yet it has a 600% higher murder rate than anywhere in the country and guns are completely banned. I was born in Cuba under a tyrannical ruling class the Castros and their regime where no one has a gun except the military, they have now spent more than my 50 years on this earth living in misery and poverty because they cannot take up arms to throw off such a government as Castro did with Batista.

Preserving our right to defend ourselves is a fundamental right and not one to be taken by the Federal Government because the 2nd Amendment prohibits them; it does not stop the states from putting in rules, which is a limited form of government that respects state sovereignty as our Constitution was conscripted by the framers. Raoul Berger a “moderate liberal” makes a great case against the incorporation of the bill of rights against the states in his Government by Judiciary book, thanks to the NRA they have successfully incorporated the 2nd Amendment and what you will see is Congress enact laws banning guns and the SCOTUS supporting them though the 14th amendment and more of our rights will die. I agree that limited self government is what the framers wanted and fought for not mob rule democracy where the majority dictates to the minority. Obvioously the writer of this article lives in his ideology and thinks that voting matters. Not with our ruling elite not anymore.

The 8th Ward is a district “with 77,000 inhabitants (over 90% black) of which even a black policeman tells us he would not enter unarmed at night. This is a district where more than 3.000 people have been murdered since 1960.
Where in one summer evening in 2007, four different shootings led to eight victims within two hours. This is a district of which a former criminal says, “When we see teenagers, we cross the street. That is how scared we are of our kids.”
Only every second resident has a job. Every third lives below the poverty line. Two out of three children grow up without their father. Nowhere else in the city are there as many high school dropouts (34%) and as many overweight people (71%, 33% of them obese). We are in the capital of the richest country in the world: Washington, DC. However, this is a place where tourists and even most Congressmen never venture.
Even some of the city’s street maps do not clearly detail this
district. We fi nd ourselves in the infamous Ward 8 district in Southeast DC, one and a half miles from the Capitol. The 8th Ward leads nearly in every negative statistic of Washington’s eight districts. Ward 7, which neighbors the 8th Ward, follows a close second.”
(retrieved on 12/27/2012 from http://www.fesdc.org/pdf/MiseryandChange_final_003.pdf)

All of the responses here boil down to two categories: grammar police and 2nd amendment absolutism.

The former is petty and adds nothing to the debate. The latter is merely indefensible. If the gov’t can’t regulate citizen ownership of arms, why shouldn’t I be able to own a grenade launcher? If your answer to that is, “You should,” then I hope that you are either expressing your active fantasy life or are on an FBI/ATF watch list.

If your answer is, “You shouldn’t,” then can we please now have an adult discussion about what constitutes reasonable “arms” regulations?

Also, I love how the first clause of the amendment can be either crucial (“security of a free state”) or conveniently irrelevant (“well-regulated militia”).

Read Federalist 46. It makes pretty clear that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to ensure the states– and the people in them– have the ability to fight an intrusive Federal government.

You may think this purpose is obsolete. You may think it is even undesirable. But do not pretend that it is inconsistent with the will of the Founders. They spelled it out for us.

Now, if you think the 2nd Amendment is silly, feel free to set about repealing it through the amendment process. Cut to the chase already. Until that is a real political possibility, just accept the fact that Americans 1) Like their guns, and 2) At least more than a few of them like them for the allegedly paranoid reason that they should be able to be a holy nuisance to a dictatorial Federal government.

And accepting THAT, sir, is part of living in a Republic. See? It works both ways.

Must we? The writer in a round about way parrots liberal gun controllers in saying it can’t happen here. The colonel following on says that even if it can happen here, too bad private citizens are outgunned you can’t win so don’t even try. Let’s deal with the colonel first.

Since WWII many insurgencies have won despite being “outgunned”. In Iraq and Afghanistan the opposition there lacked tanks/planes/satellites all of it and yet they won. Going up against the most powerful country on earth, they won. (Yes, they did.) So the notion that just because you’re not as well armed as the government means resistance is hopeless is not born out by past experience.

It can’t happen here. Sorry folks. It HAS happened here. The Japanese, many who were American citizens saw their rights, specifically their Fifth Amendments totally taken away when they were interned. For them it did happened. Jews For The Preservation Of Firearms Ownership say that had the Japanese army invaded CA there’s a good chance those internees would have been murdered by out of control hysterical mobs.

Trail of Tears anyone? The Cherokees in Georgia win in court. Jackson, eminently impeachable says, you made your decision now enforce it. How many hundreds/thousands died in that ethnic cleansing exercise? And a convincing case can be made that what happened to the Indians was more or less genocide albeit over a century or so.

We look back on Germany and with the benefit of hindsight see the inevitability of it. That is not what the victims saw. Yitzhak Zucherman second in command of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising said in his memoirs that they simply could not believe what was happening. Germany was at the time considered the most civilized country of Europe. He continued, by the time they figured out Germany WAS capable of this horrible evil, it was far too late.

EVERY act of genocide in the past century was preceded by gun control. Too many of the laws being proposed today look so very much like those Nazi gun laws. We have to be extraordinarily careful doing anything similar to what they did. Any possible benefit is far outweighed by the risk.

And note if you will the freedoms we’ve already surrendered in less than a decade. The Patriot Act, TSA, Bush and his blatant disregard for the Constitution, widespread torture of detainees, most of them innocent of wrong doing. And who supported these actions? So called “conservatives” like Rush and Sean and so many others.

Recall again the book “Ordinary Men”. The atrocities we see that are most often done are not done by “fanatics” but by your next door neighbors. And recall too if you will that Germany did not invent concentration camps, the “civilized” British did during the Boer wars where thousands of women and children died for no good reasons.

No. We do not compromise on gun control. No. Because if we are to learn anything from the last century, and equally from our own past, no government can be trusted. The people themselves cannot be trusted.

Sorry but when Marek Edelman ended up having to go up against those “civilized” Germans in Warsaw during the Uprising, being armed with just pistols didn’t really help. The gun controllers of their day were responsible for ensuring that Marek and others were as disarmed as possible and gun controllers of that day said much the same thing we are seeing now including the “Oh you needn’t worry about being subject to mass murder.” If we as country listen to that same siren song in the face of all we see, we deserve what we get.

The point made in the National Review editorial was that the massacre was pre-political in the sense that evil is pre-political – it predates politics and is independent of it. And this is a conservative insight, willfully ignored by the left: it is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve problems independent of politics, with politics.

Another conservative insight: we are already on the road to serfdom. The state is ever-expanding by nature, and the struggle to rein it in, and to keep it in its reins, will never be over; there is no method to permanentize liberty. This insight, I suspect, is at the core of the seemingly frantic fight by some against gun control.

And for good measure: mr Cooke did not see the right to keep and bear arms as ruling out “any attempt at gun control in America”. He merely stated a suspicion that any such attempt would be unsuccessful in its aims. Quite different.

I am in some sense, it seems, a proponent of the gun rights ideology in that I consider an armed populous to be an important mechanism in the machinery of liberty, one significant hurdle (among many other and perhaps more important ones) for tyranny to overcome.

Yet I am strongly in favour of gun control. I believe that this article by mr Beauchamp is part of the problem keeping you (yanks, that is) from achieving that evasive ”common sense gun control” that your chattering classes keep calling for. Namely: an insistence on framing what is essentially a concrete policy discussion in a high minded, conceptual tone and execution.

A policy discussion ought to ask two fundamental questions: Will the specific, concrete measure work? What will it cost (in both dollars and Liberty)? It seems to me that the Left is unwilling to ask these questions because they fear that the answers won’t take them where they want to go.

An ”assault weapons” ban of some sort (implicitly, but unfortunately not concretely, argued by mr Beauchamp) will do nothing to stop or mitigate mass killings, probably not even mass shootings. (The relative instrumentality of an AR-15 in such horrible crimes, is unsurprisingly and greatly overestimated by urbanized media outlets.)

The constructive way to respond to those who reasonably question the usefulness of certain legislation, would be to put forward arguments for its usefulness, rather than railing against obstructive negativism. That is, after all, fundamental to the quality of any participatory democracy.

Let’s talk validity of numbers cited. The 32,000 firearm-related death figure cited comes from the Organization of American States 2012 survey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate). If you look at the actual breakdown of figures from the site, we see that, of the 32,000 firearm-related deaths, 19,000 are due to suicide! In fact, the US has the highest reported suicide rate of all countries, with the exception of Montenegro. To me, this helps to get a proper picture of unique aspects of the US gun-death rate. The 32,000 figure is misleading when failed to be qualified. People may argue that the availability of guns make it easier to commit suicide, which is probably true. But, as a libertarian-leaning conservative, I do not, as a matter of principle, think that it is the government’s job to protect us from ourselves. Rather, the US’s high suicide figure is a compelling indictment of the spiritually impoverished lives that our materialistic and consumeristic culture is producing. So, we’re back again to the pragmatic argument of whether fewer guns will mean less lives lost. It may mean fewer suicides due to firearms, but the impact of a firearm-ban on the crime rate is highly debatable, to say the least.

The laws that govern a country are a reflection of the moral and principles of the majority of its people. In the US it is easier to buy a semi automatic weapon than to buy Lipitor or an Antibiotic. A 18 year old can buy a gun in Texas, but needs to be 21 to buy a beer. A 14 year old can play Mortal Combat on TV, but cannot watch a movie that shows a woman’s breast. An 18 year old can go to war in Afghanistan, kill our enemies and watch his friends die, but cannot buy a glass of wine. This country loves and foster arms and violence. That is the sad embarrassing truth.

I don’t know if the “grammar police” crack was directed at me, but I was not trying to police anybody. I could not recall seeing the word “suborn” used before and honestly wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. I had to look it up myself and found that it doesn’t have the meaning the author seems to think, judging from context. His usage makes no sense. From one writer to another, I would want someone to tell me.

And I can’t emphasize how silly and counter-productive to your argument it is to declare that that anyone who merely writes from even an extreme (gasp!) libertarian gun-rights position should be the subject of ongoing federal surveillance. At that point you kind of become a caricature of the position you’re attempting to defend.

Now here’s some info that I cribbed from another forum, and I’m not going to bother verifying it myself for this discussion but I found it interesting:

“Per Table 8 in the FBI’s 2011 Uniform Crime Report’s expanded offense data, the gun homicide rate for the United States is 8,583 divided by the U.S. population in 100,000’s or 2.7 per 100,000 population.

That puts the United States gun murder rate at 56th in the world, and our overall violent crime rate is 67th. The murder champion is currently Venezuela, where privately owned guns are banned, with an estimated murder rate of 220 per 100,000 – and the aggregate murder rate for “disarmed” Europe is 9.1.

The country with the lowest murder rate is Switzerland, where most homes have at least one fully automatic assault rifle in a corner of a bedroom, with an outstanding murder rate of 0.55 murders per 100,000 population. And no, that is not “coincidence.”

Neither is the fact that a very high percentage of the United States murder victims were “partners or rivals in some criminal enterprise with their killers.” When criminal on criminal killings are removed, the United States murder rate of 1.8 per 100,000 ranks among the world’s 25 lowest.”

“No. We do not compromise on gun control. No. Because if we are to learn anything from the last century, and equally from our own past, no government can be trusted. The people themselves cannot be trusted.”

and this, in a nutshell, is why we can’t have nice things in this country…..Absolutism. Whether it be guns, taxes, sane macroeconomic policies…the answer is always “compromise is out of the question”.

A constitutional republic is a democracy; a liberal democracy that is. People who say otherwise are just trying to be difficult and provocative. What the American Founders were opposed to were illiberal democracies, which is what a lot of Third World Countries transitioning out of (or toward) authoritarianism are. A good current example of this is Egypt. Democracy in the United States is similar to that in your own Britain (I may be wrong, but in another post, I think you said that you were British) . Laws are determined by the majority of both houses of Congress and the President, who is co-equal to them. If the same party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, then it’s pretty much like a majority government in a parliamentary democracy. But in a divided government like the United States currently has, then there is a lot more gridlock; similar to a minority government in a parliamentary democracy. But divided governments in the U.S. have been a lot more common than minority governments in Britain and other parliamentary democracies.

The term “republic” can mean either a representative democracy or a country without a monarch. People in your own Britain and other countries where the Crown is the head of state like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, don’t like their countries being called “republics,” but as representative democracies, that is what you all are.

Nathan, since you have addressed me directly i feel i should reply. But to be honest, i don’t really know what point you’re making in regard to what i’ve written.

That the government hasn’t got the rest of us outgunned? Obviously, they do. This seems so obvious that i have to think you’re making some other point than just your commitment to fighting on, regardless.

I can’t find any other statement of mine that you reply directly to. If you’re arguing some point found between the lines i wrote, you’d need to tell me what you read there.

The NRA is a political organization promoting what it believes to be right. What makes them more a threat to the “quality” of democracy than any other political organization, like say the ACLU? They’ve been successful in pushing there view, but they can’t stop others from arguing a different one or people from considering “all available policy options”. The NRA opposing all gun regulation doesn’t stop democratic debate at all, in fact it is a part of that debate.

If the author wants to “suborn” the opposition to gun control then he really should try making real arguments for his position rather than characterize those he disagrees with as “undemocratic”.

Criticizing this author for his use of the word “democracy” is misapplied. “Democracy” is a handy stand-in for “Bicameral Constitutional Republic,” a descriptor far too grandiloquent for most tastes. I’d much rather an author use the word “democracy” 22 times and accept that its definition has changed since ancient Athens—the only “true” democracy in the world, which still disenfranchised most of its population and only existed for some two hundred years. To argue over semantics misses the fulcrum of the man’s argument and stinks of someone trying too hard to prove s/he went to college. Let’s give it a rest already. I’m pretty sure our author here understands what our government technically is and has made a well reasoned argument from that understanding. And fyi, peoples’ use of democracy vs. republic means little about their political affiliations.

For after all, the meanings of words are fluid. Get a load of this: Until recently—like, the past decade or so—democrats were always considered “red” because of their supposed association with communism, whereas republicans were always considered “blue.” Since then, there’s been a reversal of signification. The same is true for the word “democracy.” “Republic” in Latin means “The Public Thing”—and the system it denoted changed over time, as well, becoming less and less public—and so, by the common parlance of American English, less democratic. “Democracy” means “Rule by the People.” So… this is the problem with arguing over semantics. It tends to reveal the arguer’s utter want of anything real to contribute. And if you want to insist on our Roman Republican roots, so be it: It will reveal the U.S. for the imperialists they are, and have been for quite some time. (One doesn’t need an emperor to be an imperialist. Republics make fine empires.)

Here’s the top three reasons why I’m not worried about gun control, as it is actually debated—and not as it exists in the labyrinths of paranoid minds: A.) We’re not going to take over the government should it become too despotic—we can’t regardless of whether we enact background checks and limited capacity weapons—we don’t own nukes, drones, scud missiles, etc. and they’ve never seriously entered the 2nd Amendment debate; B.) the principle reason we won’t start a revolution is because most of us already know that revolutions are far easier to carry out than actually running a country; and C.) revolutions rarely occur without the help and collusion (and ultimately the betrayal) of the military, anyway. Just look at what’s happening in Egypt right now. You know how all that got started? An out-of-work man set himself on fire. He didn’t storm the gates of the Bastille, rifle in hand. But eventually, the military co-opted the movement his protest sparked. Is Egypt seeking a true democracy in the Athenian sense? No, not really, but everybody knows what we mean when we say they want democracy. The use of the word “democracy” doesn’t automatically score points for the democratic party. Today, it mostly means universal enfranchisement and a say in political matters.

The surest sign you’re dealing with a dishonest gun control advocate — is there any other kind? — is when you see this phony, made up propaganda category “gun deaths” or “death by guns.” They like to lump justifiable homicides, police shootings, accidents, suicides and murders in one nebulous category.

kierkegaard71, the use of suicides is by design to pump the numbers up. There is no evidence that somebody suicidal won’t just use pills. But the big number helps the gun banners. I would also like to know how many “murders” are mercy killings where someone shoots their spouse or loved one who wants to die but can’t pull the trigger? I was looking at the LA Times murder list a few days ago and there was a murder/suicide of a man and his wife. We don’t know if this was a murder or should really be called a double suicide.

But that’s wrong. The tyranny argument is different from true political rights in one crucial respect: it doesn’t protect a right to democratic action.

So what? Why do we assume that democratic actions are the only actions appropriate for influencing politics in all circumstances?

Voting, staging a protest, or writing a personal blog on politics are all attempts to influence political life through the democratic process. Protecting these rights absolutely, without exception, is a means of ensuring free and equal access to the levers of collective self-determination.

Which is all nice and good, but it assumes a government that cares about its citizens/subjects and their opinions and desires. All those things you mention only work when the system allows them.

Democratic rights open up the sphere of deliberation, attempting to maximize our ability to make change through democratic, constitutional processes.

Which is fine as long as the process exists.

Say what you will about armed revolution, but it isn’t that.

The point over which you elide is that the possibility of armed revolution is based on a scenario in which the process breaks down. Not “breaks down” in the sense of “Congress won’t pass a budget deal” but in the sense of “the government has cancelled all elections until further notice.”

This difference matters. Asking a liberal society to take some options off the political table to safeguard the foundations of participatory democracy is one thing; asking that society to allow unrestricted access to deadly weapons so they can [subvert] the system itself if necessary is quite another. It’s not just that the gun rights ideology, per Alan Jacobs, represents “the absolute abandonment of civil society,” though that’s also true. It’s that it places itself against the democratic process in the name of paranoid fantasy.

It’s not like people are saying “we need guns so if the guy we don’t like wins, we can overturn the election.” They are saying “we need guns because that will discourage the government from taking certain steps, because doing so will become costlier.”

dont you and i WISH it were that simple? people often cite switzerland but dont actually know what is going on there. switzerland’s citizenry does not have easy access to guns. members of their trained military are allowed to take home the guns issued to them once their service is completed (of which records are obviously kept). HOWEVER they are not allowed to take bullets/ammo. ammo is heavily resricted and if you can obtain it, is required to stay locked up at shooting ranges. furthermore, the common citizen cannot own a gun without going through a restrictive process far more regulated than the U.S.

yes, culture does play a part and that seems to be the culture of whether one understands the need for strict regulation of guns (especially ones of military grade) or not.

I believe “karlub” is the one commenter who gets the Second Amendment right. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was not to establish a regime of Natural Rights which might be enforced in the courts of the United States against any arm of government. Just as there was no prohibition on the states establishing, supporting and protecting religious institutions and practices, or states prohibiting the publication of indecent material or the utterance of blasphemous speech, neither was there intended any interference with the states’ ability to regulate their citizen militia and laws respecting the possession and use of firearms. What the Bill of Rights did was clarify what was implicit in the Constitution ab initio – that the Congress and the President of the United States had no power to do these things.

In addition, the purpose of the Second Amendment was not to protect the right of citizens to possess and use firearms, whether for hunting, sport or personal protection, but to assure that the state militia could never be disarmed by an Act of Congress, nor Congress be able to raise an army that might subdue and suppress the lawful actions of the states as legal sovereigns. That cause was lost in the American Civil War, but it is not forgotten, and should the foundations of the existing imperial republic begin to crumble it may become an live issue once again.

The subject of Nazi Germany and gun control is also a red herring. Far from being denied firearms, German citizens under Hitler, women likewise as men, were expected to train to be able to use guns in the defense of the Homeland. As in Switzerland today, Germans were expected to be armed and ready to be called into military service on short notice. The problem in Germany that allowed Nazism to become a menace, not only to Germans themselves but to neighboring countries, was the inordinate emphasis drilled into the German character of obedience to government authority. Any body of people who confuse the dictates of rulers with the Will of God, or believe God’s blessings are assuredly bestowed upon their country’s armies and navies, always pose the danger of falling prey to same blind zealotry and inhumanity. If any parallel is to be drawn between developments in Germany in the 1920’s and 30’s and the United States today, that is the picture merely waiting to be colored in.

Ryan, words have meaning. Casual use of the term “democracy” is insidious because it implies direct majoritarian rule and creates a positive association with such tyranny of the majority. Its blanket application to designate basically any system that holds legitimate elections slowly erodes the idea that just laws and righteous leadership decisions are frequently quite unpopular, and should be.

We don’t need to forget as far back as ancient Athens, we can forget such modern inventions as the “bicameral constitutional republic” because most current public-school inmates cannot even spell that term, let alone understand and define it. Less than half of US citizens who are eligible to vote regularly do so. Those who do vote frequently find their wills ignored even if their chosen candidate wins. To the modern mind, “democracy” means that whatever the majority wants is what happens. Associating such a state of affairs with our *ahem* enlightened, industrial nations gives a distorted picture and shapes opinions to favor a very particular political bias.

Many of us think that one of the most serious problems in America today is the lack of will on the part of our leaders to make unpopular decisions. Oh, they make unpopular decisions alright, but mainly concerning corporate welfare for the sake of their own bank accounts. If career politicians made decisions on what they know to be morally right, rather than what would best help them get re-elected, we might be in a better situation as a nation. We would certainly be in a different one.

You give life to the words you speak, and we do not want mob rule, i.e. Democracy, to be the sole life of our polity. Not any more than it already is.

Please try buying a handgun in Switzerland. You will find that this is near impossible, Switzerland has some of the toughest hand gun laws in the world. They do however, have absolutly no problem with employing their citizens in a well regulated (and you actually get the assault rifle from the state, you do not have to pay the roughly 2-4K Swiss France the assault rifle would cost) milita.
Also, the assault rifles are also strongly regulated. One can not, for example, sell them or gift them, and “loosing” them is quite strongly discouraged, the serial number of each assault rifle and the “Wehrdienstnummer” (Switzerland has conscription, so some basic weapon proficiency is also a given) of the owning individuals is also known.

When approached on the subject of tyranny defence and handgun regulation, most Swiss will inquire what you believe to be the weapon of choice for a freedom fighter, and what you believe to be the weapon of choice for a criminal. “You really want to fight the Germans with a handgun? That is a somewhat poor sense of self preservation.”
The Swiss system does have a drawback in somehwhat increased suicide rates compared to Germany and Austria, but the Swiss in general are ok with the generalized trade off, although this depends on how annoying/grandstanding Germany and/or France are at any current moment.

In Switzerland, you have a right to have an assault rifle, but you need a) have been in the armed forces (who basically have to accept you unless you are seriously unfit for service) b) accept that their may be inspection on the state of your military weaponry c) accept the duties and regulations that come with owning an assault rifle.

Danger is the only reason to regulate something, and assault rifles are highly dangerous by their very nature.
They are thus strongly regulated. The highly decentralised and autonomous nature of the Swiss state tends to create above average amounts of the common sense neccessary for such regulations.

One should also note that, in some cantons, the assault rifles and/or the munition is kept at seperate places, and if you dont want a fire arm in your house you do not have to.

None of this appears to be the case in the USA, and i would guess that the Swiss model may be a fair bit closer to what your founders intended then whats going on in the USA.

If you’re interested in a Conservative argument that limits the 2nd Amendment to military matters only, I would suggest this seminal article from Garry Wills. It’s 17 years old, and thus written before the Heller Case, but it’s still worthwhile.

The problem with Germany was largely that many found themselfs backed into a corner, and believed that only a very drastic change of everything could restore prosperity. Eventually, of the two possible alternatives, the Fascists won and defeated the communists. If you deplete the well being of a people, relative to what they had once known and experienced, too much, then Extreme idiologies happen. They may already happen when people are merely afraid of loosing what they still retain, as opposed to actually being in the process of loosing it.
Other than that, the Nazis initially somewhat delivered on their promises, and also succeeded in decapaciating the communists early on, and were actually quite well connected with the establishment. Once the reverses in Russia happened, well, there werent many communists in freedom. Secondly, that incredible atrocities were comitted in the name of Germany was well known, and people expected that these atrocities would be paid back with interest if the Nazis were defeated.

For Germanys descent into the third reich, the biggest points of no return where the explicit alliance between big buisness, big conservative gouverment and Hitler, the decapaciation of the KPD and the later “Preussenstreich”, which demolished the SPD and the fairly SPD heavy Prussia. The latter was a full federal take over of the largest German state, under the pretense of restoring order after a nazi demontration turned deadly sour, and I can indeed imainge that happening in the USA.

Other major points were the fact that the conservative didnt stop killing socialists, communists and social democrats after the Spartacus revolution (this killed most notions of getting a conservative social democrat or conservative socialist alliance against the Nazis), and that the post Luxemburg KPD was too devoted to Moscow to appeal to large segements of the population, and that the KPD also fullfilled Stalins “Attack the socialists first” order to the letter.

“Casual use of the term “democracy” is insidious because it implies direct majoritarian rule and creates a positive association with such tyranny of the majority.”

Oh for Heaven’s sake. No, it is not; and no it does not, and not at all.

Basically everything you write that relates to political philosophy is either paranoid or incorrect – and mostly both. In the modern understanding of “democracy” – I teach philosophy of law – there is no single rule that defines it. True – as has been observed, in most third world countries, “democracy” is equated with voting. But that is partly the fault of the West, and in particular the United States, for its insistence on votes and parliaments and whatever without the basic infrastructures of democratic republican government have been installed – minor things like courts and the rule of law, the protection of minorities, decentralised decision-making and the like. So we manage to get Hamas and Morsi elected in countries that had no democratic history or tradition, and then people like you turn around and bleat about the dangers of democracy. Or of “democracy”.

Well, I live in a constitutional monarchy and not a “Republic”. Democracy is messy. Sometimes majorities prevail, as they should; sometimes minorities prevail, when they must. And no, we don’t have guns in every home to protect us from the guvmint – there is no tradition of revolution in my country, and the last rebellion in 1870 – because, what do you know, in a democracy, the guvmint is Us. And no, I don’t fear my fellow citizens – except when they sound like you, in which case we recommend they move to Texas or Arkansas.

All this talk of Republic v. democracy is really a misguided transposition of Gore Vidal’s critique of the American Empire, which he contrasted with a utopian Republic (mostly in the minds of Jefferson and is Vidal’s fiction, and found nowhere in American history), much as Cicero had talked up the Republic against Caesar’s nascent Empire. And of course pan-Hellenic thinking contrasted Athenian democracy against the Roman Republic.

None of which is remotely relevant to modern day discussions of liberal democratic government. In basic structure, there is no difference between the constitutional monarchies of the Netherlands and Canada on the one hand, and the Republics of West Germany and France. The United States stands apart only in the sense that seditious kooks like you can propagate armed resistance against the state under the cover of the Second Amendment and get away with it.

You are wrong. The Swiss are allowed to keep ammo in home. It’s not a perfect parallel (neither is the UK, Canada, Australia, etc.), but the Swiss example definitely shows that easy gun ACCESS per se is not a problem.

As for regulation, gun control advocates ought to quit acting like America is a free for all. It’s not. America is not regulation free when it comes to guns. Our problem is the people who don’t follow the regulations.

Americans who purchase their guns legally are regulated by the existing regulations for obtaining guns and laws against gun crime. The legal owners of registered firearms in this country rarely commit crimes. It shows that regulation works IF you’re dealing with a population that is open to and willing to be regulated in the first place.

The vast majority of the gun crime in this country is committed by people who don’t obtain their weapons legally, that is, people who don’t follow society’s regulations.

Once you unravel this question — why does America produce and tolerate a large criminal class that ignores society’s regulations? — we’re right back at culture.

Anyone who thinks the US population does not have enough arms to bring down a totalitarian government is probably downright stupid, woefully ignorant, or just lying.

And, most certainty, that same person has never set a boot in Iraq or Afghanistan. Those of us who have placed said boot in said sand-boxes have seen first hand M1A tanks (tje epitome and symbol of American military land might) turned away by a few squads of partially retarded, armed, high on drugs “Freedom Fighters.” And, after the F-16s are called in to drop 15,000 pounds of ordnance on said freedom fighters and the resulting destruction kills a few dozen women and children, some of us have also witnessed that ex-squad-size band of “Freedom Fighters” turn into hundreds. And, ultimately, some of us have seen the Greatest Military Power That Has Ever Existed turn it’s tail and run from the above scenario.

Or maybe some people should just pick up a book on the American Revolution. Our Founders knew the power of a man with a rifle … and that the reaction of The People In Power to that man, and the resulting Public Opinion, is where the power really lies.

At Ben: Sir, what fundamental rights are do you believe should be compromised? Fifth Amendment? We’ve already done that. Padilla an American on American soil was detained in circumstances that probably violated his Eighth Amendment rights too. And those Americans being executed abroad with no court supervision, no “due process” even though they were not on a battlefield? How much “compromise do you think is acceptable before we become the people we hate? Or are we mostly there already?

William read the Second Amendment again. The militia clause is a dependent clause and as we know from English grammar it is descriptive but not controlling. “The right of the people” is the independent sentence here. Everywhere that “the people” is used in the Bill of Rights, it refers to an individual, not a collective right. You and other gun controllers are asking us to believe that Madison meant one thing three times but got sloppy the fourth time. That defies credibility. And The wording “The right of the people” means it’s an existing right not one being created. Call it common law, call it an unalieable right whatever but the restrictions you and other gun controllers cite are not supported by the wording here. But also cite one quote ONE from any of the Founders that support what you say. ONE. If you can I’ll join the Violence Policy Center. Madison: “Disarm the people that is the best and most effective way to enslave them.” He didn’t say “disarm the MILITIA”. “Americans have the right and right and advantage of being armed . . . ” Again, not the MILITIA. And besides George Mason said who is the militia? It is everyone save a few public officials.

As for Germany: What I was referring to is that they disarmed minorities and that THOSE laws look all too much like proposed legislation today. Look at gun control in the south in the early 1900’s. It was directed not at whites but at blacks to make them less likely to resist abuses directed at them. The same for those Jews that were disarmed. And the Tutsis that were the subject of gun control in Rwanda. No genocide was carried out against any well armed victim population in the last century. Most all such actions were preceded by gun control against the intended targets.

Finding Americans to do similar actions is easy. The famous study where the man in the white coat tells the subject to ask an unseen man a question. Wrong answer. Administer an electric shock. Ask another question. Wrong answer. Raise the voltage. This test was repeated recently and well over 70 percent raised the voltage to the point where had it been real the unseen person would have been in ICU or dead.

Despite the principles established at Tokyo and Nuremburg that you MUST disobey illegal orders, with no “national security” exceptions American personnel routinely carry out acts of torture all the time and other detainee abuse that are unconstitutional, illegal and conflict with post war international agreements. All in the name of saving American lives, much the same justification used by the Germans and Japanese when they did it.

To the writer of the article and to all of you, consider the lessons of history carefully. Consider how we act today. Read the book “Torture and Impunity”. Look at how Americans today are being mistreated by our own government in the name of “national security”. The Founders were right. The writer says no government in history with this level of stability has never “gone rogue”. He’s wrong for one thing but so what? We are supposed to rest our safety and security on that assurance? Find again a quote from any Founder that agrees with this. Madison again: “The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.” That applies to people at the ballot box too.

I don’t know about the rest of you but I choose to stand with the Founders here. And if you are a real conservative, you’ll be right beside me.

What comment guidelines allow Icarusr’s personal attacks and name calling (calling a contributor a paranoid seditious kook) to pass moderation but not my characterization of gun control advocates as dishonest?

“Each such individual is required to keep his army-issued personal weapon (the 5.56x45mm Sig 550 rifle for enlisted personnel and/or the 9mm SIG-Sauer P220 semi-automatic pistol for officers, medical and postal personnel) at home. Up until October 2007, a specified personal retention quantity of government-issued personal ammunition (50 rounds 5.56 mm / 48 rounds 9mm) was issued as well, which was sealed and inspected regularly to ensure that no unauthorized use had taken place.[4] The ammunition was intended for use while traveling to the army barracks in case of invasion.”